End of shutdown means national parks, forests are reopening

Visitors at Tunnel View, like Kaori Nishimura and Eriko Kuboi, from Japan, pose in front of Half Dome, center facing, during the reopening of Yosemite National Park, Calif., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013. Tunnel View is a scenic vista which shows off El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall. The park reopened Wednesday night with the end of the 16-day partial government shutdown.
GARY KAZANJIAN — AP PHOTO

Closed signs were flipped to “Yes, we’re open” at Southern California’s federal parks, forest lands and nature centers Thursday for the first time this month, the result of signed legislation that funds the government for another three months.

Hundreds of furloughed National Park Service workers were back on the job at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Joshua Tree National Park and the other federally run parks, forests and monuments in the state, including Yosemite National Park.

Rangers with the U.S. Forest Service were scouring the vast Angeles National Forest and San Bernardino National Forest on Thursday to unlock gates, service restrooms and call in volunteers who regularly help run visitor centers and recreation sites.

Day use and campgrounds will be opening soon, possibly by the weekend, said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Sherry Rollman. Rollman said not all sites will be open today. For example, the popular Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) area in the Angeles just north of the East Fork Bridge off Highway 39 may not reopen until Sunday or Monday, she said.

Those hoping to return to their favorite forest sites are encouraged to call their local ranger district before they go, she said. Also, fire danger remains very high, meaning forest fires can start easily due to dry brush and breezy weather, she warned.

“Sometimes it is just a matter of unlocking the gates and emptying the trash,” Rollman said Thursday afternoon. “We hope to be business as usual as soon as possible.”

Areas closed by the partial shutdown in the Santa Monica Mountains that have reopened include: Cheeseboro Canyon, Paramount Ranch, Zuma/Trancas Canyons, Solstice Canyon, Rancho Sierra Vista and the Circle X Ranch, which includes a campground.

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At least two weddings scheduled during the shutdown at Paramount Ranch, an Old West town once used as backdrops for major motion pictures and TV shows, were postponed or relocated, said Kate Kuykendall, spokesperson for the National Park Service in Thousand Oaks.

King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas, a 588-acre site in the middle of the recreation area that contains the Santa Monica Mountains visitors center, reopened Thursday.

“The visitor’s center is in the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains. That is good news for people who want to reorient themselves to these beautiful mountains this weekend,” said Joseph Edmiston, executive director of the SMMC, the largest conservancy in the United States.

About 83 furloughed employees of the NPS in Southern California returned to work Thursday, Kuykendall said.

At Joshua Tree in San Bernardino County, 92 furloughed workers were back on the job, said Lorna Shuman, parks spokesperson. After 16 days, the park reopened Thursday morning, she said.

“We are excited we are back up. Hopefully, we will be back to normal,” she said.

Joshua Tree and Oasis visitor centers reopened Thursday morning, she said, as did the park’s western and southern entrances. The North entrance remains closed due to flood damage. Campgrounds will be reopen 8 a.m. today, she said.

Already, telephone dispatchers were flooded with calls late Wednesday and early Thursday about the park’s reopening, she said. The park will honor campground reservations. The campgrounds are nearly filled for this weekend and for the entire month, she said.

“We are expecting to see a lot of people coming into the park. October weekends are very busy in general,” Shuman said.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum announced the shutdown’s end via a simple message on its website and a good deal.

“The Reagan Library is back open. Come visit us today!,” it said.

To celebrate, the first 50 guests were admitted for free instead of the usual $15 fee.

The library in Simi Valley is operated by a mix of federal workers and non-government staff.

Thirty government employes were furloughed, while another 30 to 40 contract workers like groundskeepers were also put out of work, said John Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation.

“We had some wind out here that took down a few trees and I saw some tumbleweeds blowing through the parking lot on some days. But by the end of the day we will back in ship shape,” he said.

The three-week shutdown did hit the library hard. The facility hosts between 8,000 to 10,000 visitors a week. And there were 15,000 visitors the week before the shutdown to view the Abraham Lincoln exhibit, which was ending.

Traffic fell off to about 2,000 visitors weekly, but they did not leave without a treat. Federal employees handle library operations but the foundation owns and operates the Air Force One Pavilion.

“They couldn’t see the museum but we allowed them to go to the Air Force One Pavilion for free. We couldn’t fully make their day but we put some smiles on faces,” Heubusch said.

The 16-day shutdown left a backlog of work for NPS biologists, Kuykendall said.

Just before Oct. 1, biologists noticed the tracking device implanted in a tagged mountain lion called P-24 was running out of battery power. Efforts to find the cat and replace the device with a battery collar were unsuccessful and then abandoned due to the funding interruption.

On Thursday, biologists said P-24’s trail was cold. The young lion was last seen in Topanga State Park about 18 days ago.

“He could be anywhere in the Santa Monica Mountains,” she said.

A week or so ago, a mountain lion was struck by a car on the 101 Freeway near the Liberty Canyon exit. The biologists have kept the body in a freezer. Now they can perform a necropsy to learn more about where it came from by examining its DNA, she said.

The biologists hope the same fate does not await P-24, since young male mountain lions recently separated from their mothers are most vulnerable to being struck by a car.

Last year, 35 million people visited national parks in California, generating about $1.2 billion in economic benefits. It is not known how much the closure of the parks hurt the state’s economy.

However, Standard & Poor’s estimated the shutdown took $24 billion out of the U.S. economy.

Western Growers, an agriculture industry trade group, said a backlog of H-2A visa applications that resulted from furloughed workers at the U.S. Office of Foreign Labor Certification has left more than 4,000 temporary workers on the other side of the U.S. border at harvest time.

The growers say the country’s $4 billion winter vegetable crop is in jeopardy unless worker visa applications are expedited by Nov. 18. About 90 percent of the country’s winter vegetables — mostly celery and broccoli — are grown in California and Arizona and could be left to rot.

The crisis could spike vegetable prices in grocery stores, said Wendy Fink-Weber, spokeswoman for the group.

It usually takes about eight weeks to process visas of H-2A workers, she said.